AFP Commissioner Andrew Colvin at a hearing at Parliament House in December. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

With just days to go until Bali nine ringleaders Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran are executed, Mr Colvin was asked the question by a reporter during an address to the Lowy Institute.

It was eerily similar to the question lawyer Robert Myers has been asking since his friend's son, Scott Rush, was arrested at Denpasar airport on April 17, 2005, with 1.3 kilograms of heroin strapped to his body.

Mr Myers, a friend of Rush's father, Lee, called a man he knew in the AFP in 2005, asking him to stop Scott leaving Sydney for Bali.

Lee Rush was worried his son may have been recruited to be a drug mule and in desperation he asked Mr Myers to do whatever he could to intervene.

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Instead, the AFP tipped off its Indonesian counterparts that a heroin smuggling operation was being planned.

The men were arrested in Bali a week later and Rush was handed a life sentence, later increased to the death penalty on appeal before being reduced back to a life sentence in the country's Supreme Court.